Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Yep. And I had no business putting myself in that equation. He really wanted me to stay. But given my status, I couldn’t make any promises about the future. I had to be honest about that. I didn’t want him to give up anything because of me.”

  “That was such an unselfish decision. And painful. Nobody your age does that.”

  She shrugged. “I’m my age. And I did it.”

  “You did.”

  Tig rubbed her nose. “Remember when that leather babe came to our house and you gave her the lecture on marriage? Like, you can’t win the race without running the marathon? I guess I’ve always known that. From watching you and Dad.”

  Willa felt stunned, for more reasons than she could count. She drew Tig into her arms. “Knowing and doing are different things. You did the hardest thing in the world. I had no idea.”

  Tig crumpled in her embrace and wept, giving in to her grief while Willa suffered an avalanche of memories: Tig showing up on the doorstep in Virginia with the beaten look of a stray dog. Tig sitting shell-shocked in the living room while she and Iano vented their angst over the loss of all security, channeling too much of it as anger at a wayward daughter. Iano lecturing her on getting herself back to school. Speaking to a child. Willa regretted every failure while she held her daughter and stroked her hair and marveled that mothers’ and daughters’ hearts can be crushed so repeatedly without learning to defend themselves. She thought of times she’d fallen apart in her own mother’s arms, and let herself be put back together.

  When words came to Willa, she heard them in her mother’s voice, and said them aloud. “Tell me something you did with Toto that made you happy.”

  “Mom. It’s over. I’m with Jorge now.”

  “You are, and I guess it feels disloyal to talk about somebody you loved before. I might not be the right mother for this, either. I’ve only ever been in love with one person. Which is so weird. Most people are like you, leaving pieces scattered along the trail.”

  “But I’m happy now. With Jorge. So I don’t know why I’m so sad.”

  “Maybe because this hasn’t healed yet. You’re trying to forget things your heart still wants to remember.”

  “The past is the past.”

  “It is. And you were really happy, so it’s worth remembering. Tell me something that was wonderful. The secret beach.”

  Tig shook her head, the garden of locks. “No. I’ll tell you the best date of my life. We went to a restaurant.”

  “Was it a special occasion?”

  “Oh yeah. It was a fancy place, way too expensive for every day. It was Lorenzo and Natalia’s fortieth anniversary. Toto’s parents. They took the whole family out.”

  The best date of her life was a celebration of her ex-boyfriend’s parents’ anniversary. Willa took this personally. Her mothering had driven her daughter to seek asylum in a family of foreigners. “It must have been some restaurant.”

  “Oh God, was it ever. It’s in an old house, hundreds of years old. The family has had it since before the revolution so a lot of the furniture is original and everything in the whole place is beautiful and old and perfect. Like the china and silver, candlesticks, handmade lace tablecloths, napkins. We were all dressed up, and when they seated us I just sat there holding my breath, looking at the table set with those pretty china plates and silverware and sparkly crystal glasses. Every single thing on that table had to be over fifty years old, Mom. From before the embargo. Different tables had different settings, what do you call them, china patterns. Not all just alike. And none of it’s broken, and all of it is twice as old as me. It was the most amazing experience.”

  Willa wanted to understand, but as far as she’d ever known, Tig cared less than nothing for the likes of china and flatware. “So did they feed you, or just dazzle you with the presentation?”

  “Oh, the food was amazing. And the music. They had this super smooth band playing mambos and sarabandas. The singer looked all prim but then opens her mouth and out comes this killing sexy voice, and of course we all danced, between courses. Everybody dances in Cuba. They’ve perfected all the fun things that don’t cost anything, like dancing and sex. But Mom, think about it. When did you ever see fifty-year-old china in a restaurant?”

  She thought about this. “Never. It’s always generic white plates. In fancy places, fancy generic I guess. But new. Probably it’s all made in China, for restaurants.”

  “Exactly. I asked them here, at the restaurant, and Yari told me they have to reorder every year because it gets chipped and messed up. People are careless. If they break it there’s always more. But in Cuba, whatever it is, you probably can’t get more, so people take care. When you pick up a glass it’s like you’re raising a toast to all the people that drank from it before. All those happy anniversaries in a beautiful place, and all the future ones. It made me so happy, Mom. That night was our turn. We got to be in the treasure chest of time.”

  12

  Treasure Chest of Time

  Before we march into territory where angels fear to tread, I would like to make four statements that will offend no one in this room. May I, sir?” Thatcher made an obsequious little bow to the moderator with his hands pressed together as if in prayer—a flattery unavailable to his one-handed opponent. On this night anything was fair.

  “Yes, yes, proceed.” Landis was impatient. The point of this forum was to get Thatcher mired in the angel swamps. In his newspaper he’d billed the debate as a forum on Darwin versus Decency. The man knew how to fill a hall.

  “Thank you, I will.” But instead Thatcher paused, as advised by his able trainers. He offered a genteel nod to Cutler at his podium, pink cheeked as a pig, in a new frock coat and his best wooden hand. Then to Landis, sprawled in his chair between them. Then to the ladies and gentlemen, farmers, spiritualists, and scalawags who had paid their fifteen cents to see him hang. Polly and Mary sat in the second row: Polly bursting, Mary grave. Rose absent. Rose had gone riding, with her new boots and companion Louise Dunwiddie, both given her by Thatcher. They had locked up such a fast friendship he wondered why Rose never thought to initiate it herself. Pride was the answer. The well bred did not self-invite or supplicate themselves to horse-owning families.

  Polly gave a secret, infinitesimal nod: now he should speak.

  “First principle. Individuals within a population are variable. This is obvious, isn’t it? A farmer who raises cattle knows it. Any household where a dog births her particolored litter has seen it. Tall corn and short, swift foxes and sluggish, when we study Creation we see variety among members of a kind.” Thatcher turned to see Cutler alarmed: the Creation card already played, on the side of indecency! Thatcher smiled. “I will pause so Professor Cutler may refute the premise.”

  Landis uncrossed his long legs, turned to the audience, and pulled a face that aroused laughter. He couldn’t bear boredom, or any man hogging his light. “Well Cutler, it’s your go. Do you wish to refute the premise that a bitch can throw a ragbag of pups?”

  “To spare this audience more tedium than my opponent needs to inflict, no sir.”

  “Thank you.” Thatcher rested his hands on the podium. Pause, look, speak. “Second principle. Traits in their variation are inherited. The ragbag medley of pups all derive from their mother. A greyhound’s pups may be white or black but they will not be Skye terriers. Unless the father was a Skye terrier, in which case the pups will bear some resemblance to both parents. We do not know the mechanism for this inheritance, but we cannot deny life holds some elixir for transmitting character from progenitor to offspring. Or, perhaps Professor Cutler does wish to deny it. Please, sir.”

  “An elixir for transmitting character.” Cutler rucked his mouth as if he’d touched his tongue to shit. “I do not like the sound of that. I do not. It makes me think of a witches’ brew.” He gave the ladies a moment to shudder, hat feathers to quiver. Thatcher thought of herons. “My opponent refutes himself!” Cutler boomed. “We cannot know the mechanism of this
inheritance. Why? Because the universe is a mystery sprung from God’s mind. Its order derives from the orderly mind of its creator.” Cutler bore his customary stiffness, wrists hovering near the bend of his waist. “The pups of a greyhound are greyhounds because God wishes them so. And may we be thankful, lest we have squids and marmosets getting born on our kitchen floors to our four-footed friends!”

  A breeze of laughter ruffled the room. Thatcher scanned faces for sympathy and found an Italian matron with a faint moustache who looked ready to clasp him to her bosom. She wore a flat little bonnet like a fried egg. He tried not to lose concentration while waiting for permission to speak. Their moderator’s mind seemed to have wandered from Plum Hall, but the silence brought him back. “And to this you say what, Mr. Greenwood?”

  “I did not say we cannot know the mechanism of inheritance, only that we don’t know it yet. The Swiss doctor Johann Miescher …” Thatcher carefully slowed his pace. People expect to be bored with science, Polly had told him, so you must dole it out preciously like Turkish delights. “… has discovered a substance in the seepage from wounds that contains mostly nuclear matter. He believes it functions in transmitting heredity.”

  The mention of seeping wounds moved Cutler to theatrical disgust, while poor Captain Landis stifled a yawn. Polly’s face was long. During his rehearsals in the carriage house, Mary had offered suggestions on matters of science but Polly took full charge of rhetoric. Thatcher steered back to his charted course. “Next I offer the third principle, which is death. Death stalks us all!” Polly’s face brightened; the line was hers.

  Cutler’s naked cheeks flamed. He must have expected a repeat of the ritual drubbing at the school auditorium, not this dodging and weaving. Thatcher stepped from his podium, displaying a confidence he could nearly imagine. His eye found the moustached matron, who seemed ready to express maternal milk on his behalf.

  “We are many more of us born to this world than will live to an old age. It’s true for men, truer for flora and fauna. Consider the maples that line our streets, dropping their whirligig keys like snowdrifts on our walkways. Every one is a seed. A hopeful tree.”

  He took a few more steps from his podium. “Imagine if each of these grew to be a maple. There should be no room in Vineland for us to stand between them. It’s the same with mice or dandelions. Many more seeds and pups are dropped than may prosper. Otherwise we would be pressed like keepsakes among all the flora and fauna of this planet. Our saving grace, ladies and gentlemen, is what?”

  He watched mouths move in a silent chorus: Death.

  “Yes. Our salvation is the reaper. The mouse reaps the seed, the cat reaps the mouse. By its infinite means, death overpowers. Into this world—this orderly model of God’s mind—more lives are born than are granted to live. What say you, Professor?”

  “What say I?” Cutler was rattled, and left to fend for himself while their moderator examined his velvet-waistcoated belly. “To the suggestion our world is dangerous? I should call that stale news! Our nation bleeds itself dry! One in five of our young men died in the war and we are still riven, north against south, countryman against immigrant, laborer against lord.” Cutler seemed to be clutching a runaway horse set off by a gunshot. “We see black men rise up to threaten their former masters. Here in our own streets we have seen women in trousers! Desiring to lord themselves over men, turning against God’s own domestic harmony. All sense of order is sundered. When men are not running themselves through the blades of threshers or falling under carriage wheels, they murder one another outright. It curdles the blood to read the morning news.”

  At the mention of his newspaper Landis left off his belly gazing and drew up rather sharply. Cutler toadied. “And we are blessed to be well informed of the rancor that looms in our nation, thankful for the protections granted us in Vineland. Here we have order. But! We are wasting this audience’s time. Has my opponent chosen this forum for the purpose of declaring the obvious, that danger stalks?”

  Thatcher had hardly chosen it; he was invited as a condition of his employment. And now his only choices were to lose his case, or humiliate his employer and pay the price. He would have preferred a duel of pistols: to shoot or be shot, not both. “As I said in my opening statement—”

  Cutler interrupted. “May I ask my colleague to keep to Darwin and decency?”

  “You may. Here is the last of my four principles: survival is not haphazard. Creatures differ in their ability to survive, not by chance but owing to traits inherited from their progenitors. And with these four declarations of the obvious, I’m finished.”

  Cutler looked stupefied. “You haven’t. Where is Darwin? Where is decency?”

  “Both here. You took no objection to Darwin’s theory of descent with modification by natural selection, which I’ve just explained in full.”

  “Liar! You never even mentioned his name.”

  “We could discuss the laws of motion without mentioning Sir Isaac Newton. Scientific laws are not the property of a man. They exist outside of us.”

  “Mr. Greenwood, you will not slink away from your heresies!”

  “If I were a heretic, I’m certain I wouldn’t. You are a gifted inquisitor.” He risked a devilish glance at the audience. “But I wonder if my opponent has read Mr. Darwin’s book?”

  “Have not. Will not.”

  “Well of course you wouldn’t have, the thing is more than a thousand pages.”

  “I don’t have to!” Cutler cried. Thatcher had succeeded nicely in nudging him near to combustion. “I read Samuel Wilberforce’s reaction to it, I have it just here …” He sifted through the mess of papers on his podium, located a journal, and aimed it like a firearm at Thatcher. “In the Quarterly Review!”

  “I can explain natural selection,” Thatcher continued patiently, as if nothing at all had exploded, “using an example from Darwin’s book. Wolves catch their prey by fleetness and craft. In every litter, variation exists—principle one!—with some poor pups inclined to sloth and dullness. As teachers and mothers know, every litter has them—”

  “Wilberforce said Darwin’s views tend inevitably, and I quote, to banish from the mind most of the attributes of the almighty!”

  “Now, remember the reaper. In some years the prey for our growing brood of wolves will be scarce and difficult to catch. Only the fleetest siblings will kill enough rabbits to advance themselves to breeding age. Their dull brothers, alas, will perish. But to the quick survivor, stronger, fleeter pups are born in turn. Variation will persist, but over time the fierce and the quick will come to predominate the species we call wolf.”

  A loud knocking brought the hall to silence. It was Cutler’s wooden hand banging the podium. It went still, and Thatcher continued. “As the predator grows fleet, so does his prey. The longer-legged rabbits survive to multiply their prowess.” Cutler resumed his banging but Thatcher talked over him, loudly, feeling his words drawn into the rhythm as music is pulled to a metronome. “Or imagine this. Among speckled rabbits in snowy country, fortune falls to those whose coats are white, like the Arctic hare, which hides well from its enemies. The hare did not decide to become white. It benefited from generations in which lighter color won out. This is called an adaptation. It can be a structure, like the rabbit’s coat. Or a behavior.” He caught a breath. The banging had stopped. “Like persistence. Thank you. I rest my case.”

  Roused by the sudden shift of attention, Landis alerted at the shoulders like a marionette. Both his hands flew up. “We adjourn now for a short interlude!”

  This was a surprise. Thatcher felt they’d hardly begun. But Landis was a man of instinct and his gut called for an interlude. Already people were out of their seats. “I know you will not go far,” Landis shouted over their noise, “as Decency will be calling you back for the second half of our forum.”

  Thatcher watched Landis glad-handing the better-dressed patrons in the front row. They might not reconvene until the captain had pressed every inch of lady f
lesh that showed itself south of a sleeve. Mrs. Landis would not be there, she never attended lectures, as she was widely said to be fragile. Thatcher wondered what was being widely said of his own wife, who also neglected lectures lately, preferring Louise Dunwiddie and Marvel, the speckled Arabian. He only hoped the association would bring Rose the standing she craved. Aurelia certainly approved of the Dunwiddies’ fortune in glass manufacture. They all rode out together: Louise; her foppish brother Leverett; Orville, the widowed father; and sometimes Aurelia, not to ride but to watch the young people with poor Mr. Dunwiddie. The “poor,” Thatcher gathered, was for a wealthy man still going about in the last suit his dead wife had chosen for him from fashion plates five years in the dustbins. Rose and Aurelia discussed Mr. Dunwiddie as if he were a cut of meat that needed spicing. Thatcher knew what women intended when they spoke of improving a man. He let himself imagine a new life, Aurelia moved to another house, finally married to someone whose fortune held up. What peace they all might find then, he and Rose especially. A mother’s unfulfilled ambitions lie heaviest on her daughters.

  Thatcher found himself invisible as people milled about greeting their neighbors. He wondered if he was expected to press the flesh of Plum Hall or stay at his post. Cutler stood fast, shuffling through papers with ominous intent. Landis now approached Polly: Thatcher watched her tip down her little bonnet, pretend to mind her step in the aisle, and deftly avoid him. Impressive. She made her way toward Thatcher looking so womanly in her bustled skirt and basque bodice, he felt sad for her lost, uncorseted youth. Mary was still caught at her seat by her friend Phoebe and the interminable Mr. Campbell, who had the historian’s gift for sparing no detail of a story. Thatcher held his eye on Mary until she glanced up and returned his smile, flooding him with assurance. He had carried their banner decently through the first half. He surprised himself by wishing Rose had been there to see it. An odd thought, probably a violation of some truce between them. He’d promised Rose the debate would be tedious, to save her from having to make an excuse. And himself, from risking further humiliation in her eyes.